4 ms·

You are certain a bike generates more pollution over it's lifetime then a car? Or only in the manufacturing?

• VLM 13y ago
  A worthy third option is "per mile". I got 160K in 16 years out of my last car. It cost about $20K. I figured its total lifetime cost including gas and what little maintenance it needed at thirty five grand. So figure about 20 cents per mile. That's cheaper than average, then again it was more of a beater of an old car that most would tolerate. Mechanically fine, but cosmetically a mess. So yes twenty cents per mile is not totally ridiculous. Being a purely recreational biker I suspect I've only got 1K or so miles on my "Giant" bike from 1992. It was about $300 but the way tires decay (why so much faster than car?) and general minor repairs I'm sure I'm in for $500 by now. So I'm paying 50 cents per mile, or about 2.5 times more than my commuter car costs the environment. Worst of all, being a recreational bike, I've caused $500 worth of environmental destruction just for fun when I could have meditated or bird watched or gone hiking. And if you get rid of the recreational bikers, that's a large market segment so costs and enviro-damage will increase. Aside from the obvious win of get rid of recreational bikers, well, they'll just drive to the mall with their new spare time or whatever. I'm sure I could game the numbers and if I had a recreational car and a commuter bike the numbers could be made to look different. One problem with a commuter bike is the weather only cooperates about 1/3 of the year, and my car goes easily six times faster than my bike, making the commute punishingly impossible.